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Tv Sports: ESPN Challenger Will Try to Punch Above Its Weight

August 15, 2013 by

Fox Sports 1 appears to be the stiffest competition for ESPN because of the resources of its parent, 21st Century Fox, and the ambitions of its chairman, Rupert Murdoch, whose failed challenge to ESPN in the 1990s inexorably led to the newest one.

But even as it takes aim at ESPN, Fox Sports 1 has a long way to go to match an empire that is nearly 35 years in the making. Fox Sports 1 does not have nearly as many events, nor does it have an empire as large or revenue as immense as ESPN’s. But Fox executives are looking, for now, less at the impossible task of knocking out ESPN than at establishing a competitive niche.

For this, they look for inspiration within its own history of industry-altering start-ups: Fox News Channel in 1996, which has upended cable news, and the Fox broadcast network’s acquisition of N.F.L. rights 20 years ago.

“The question now is the same you would have asked Roger Ailes when he started Fox News: how do you deal with the 800-pound CNN elephant in the room, and with MSNBC?” said David Hill, the founding chairman of Fox Sports and a consultant to Fox Sports 1. “You don’t worry about anybody else apart from yourself or whether you’re going to fail.”

Fox News’s success was, of course, built on strong personalities and conservative politics, not acquiring events, as Fox Sports 1’s will be based upon. It has Pacific-12 and Big 12 Conference football and basketball; Big East basketball; Nascar; the UFC; the UEFA Champions League; Major League Baseball (starting in 2014) and World Cup soccer coverage (starting with the women’s tournament in 2015). And last week, Fox added the United States Open golf championship, paying $1.2 billion over 12 years to outbid NBC and ESPN to broadcast a sport it has never carried.

That’s a pretty good start compared with how NBC Sports Network and the CBS Sports Network began — and how they are now.

Another rival, CNN/SI, did not survive. Turner Broadcasting and Time Warner started CNN/SI as a news and highlights channel in 1996, but it had no sports events. ESPN countered by creating ESPNews. Death came to CNN/SI in 2002. “It was difficult competing with an organization that is dedicated to gobbling up rights,” said Steve Robinson, who was the executive vice president of CNN/SI.

Fox Sports 1 is designed as the spiritual offspring to the freewheeling “Fox NFL Sunday” show on the Fox broadcast network, where “sugarcoating the information pill” became the mantra. That has led to Fox Sports 1 now being the avatar of fun.

About that positioning, Will Leitch wrote on Sports on Earth : “Because nothing is more intellectually serious than ESPN!”

Eric Shanks, the co-president of Fox Sports, said: “We’re going to spend a lot of time in marketing on fun. It’s not Saturday night laughs at the Chuckle Hut. But being tough is fun. Buzzer beaters are fun. Tailgating is fun. Slam dunks are fun. We feel there’s a place in the sports landscape for a positive, fun, enthusiastic fan perspective on sports.”

That philosophy led Fox Sports 1 to hire Jay Onrait and Dan O’Toole, known for their jokey approach as sports anchors in Canada, to play the same roles on its marquee nightly news show, “Fox Sports Live.”

It also led to placing Regis Philbin and a comedian, Michael Kosta, on the weekday afternoon talk show “Crowd Goes Wild.”

Still, Fox Sports 1 cannot divert too far from doing what is necessary to be a successful network: producing games and studio shows intelligently, and hiring people for the studio shows and game broadcasts who are enlightening, good company and maybe a lot of fun.

Shanks acknowledges that Fox Sports 1 will be compared, especially, to ESPN.

How well will “Crowd Goes Wild,” with Philbin and five of his cohorts, compete from 5 to 6 p.m. Eastern against “Around the Horn” and “Pardon The Interruption”? Will Onrait and O’Toole make fans flee ESPN’s venerable “SportsCenter” at 11 p.m.? Will Fox Sports 1 provide an alternative to Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith’s infernal debating on “First Take”?

Watching Fox Sports 1 begin its journey is Mark Lazarus, chairman of the NBC Sports Group, whose properties include the NBC Sports Network.

“There’s a role for everybody,” he said. “The sports pie is growing.” He added, “I think Fox Sports 1 will find, as we have, you get your report card every morning and you’ll have good mornings and bad mornings.”

John Skipper, the president of ESPN, said: “Having seen their offerings to date, we feel in a very good position to compete. We relish that competition. It will sharpen us.” He has taken some high-profile steps to counter Fox Sports 1, bringing back Keith Olbermann, swiping Jason Whitlock from Fox and hiring the political and sports statistician Nate Silver from The New York Times.

Fans now must find Fox Sports 1. It is replacing Speed, the motor sports network, on cable, satellite and telephone company channel menus. Its various locations around the country can be found on the Fox Sports 1 Web site. Fox has spent more than a year converting Speed to Fox Sports 1 in order to charge more for it. The company said it expected to have about 90 million subscribers.

David Bank, an analyst for RBC Capital Markets, said that the Fox negotiators’ goal has been to push Speed’s subscriber fee of about 23 cents a month to $1 in four years or so. “I don’t think anybody expected Fox Sports 1 to get 80 cents immediately,” he said, referring to a report published Thursday. “There will be a predictable ramp-up to profitability. This is a phenomenal business.”

A $1 subscriber fee can fuel a billion-dollar network, but that lacks the same octane that ESPN receives from its monthly subscriber fee of $5.54, according to the research company SNL Kagan. That fee translates to revenue of around $6.6 billion.

The difference in ESPN and Fox Sports 1’s finances may not play a role when the rights to the Big Ten Conference and the N.B.A. come up for bidding. Those are the next major battlegrounds where Fox Sports 1 may or may not alter industry history.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/16/sports/fox-sports-1-an-espn-challenger-will-try-to-punch-above-its-weight.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Reports See New Roles for Megyn Kelly and Alec Baldwin

August 9, 2013 by

The Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly and the actor Alec Baldwin were at the center of unconfirmed reports this week about programming changes said to be planned at two of the cable news networks.

Ms. Kelly, according to an account first reported this week by the Drudge Report, is expected to get the 9 p.m. weeknight show on Fox News, a slot now occupied by Sean Hannity. There has been wide speculation about where Fox planned to place Ms. Kelly, a rising star at the network, since the network’s chief executive, Roger Ailes, announced that she would definitely join the Fox News prime-time lineup.

MSNBC is said to be planning a show for Mr. Baldwin that would be broadcast once a week on Fridays at 10 p.m., according to the Mediaite Web site, which first reported the item on Thursday.

For the moment at least, the moves remain unconfirmed. The role for Ms. Kelly is considered plausible, because it is consistent with versions of Fox’s plans for prime-time adjustments that have emerged in the last several weeks.

Fox responded to the online speculation with a statement: “We will neither confirm nor deny any programming schedule changes. As previously stated, the network has signed long-term deals with Megyn Kelly, Bret Baier, Shepard Smith, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Greta Van Susteren.”

Mr. Ailes also appeared at a business conference with Neil Cavuto, an anchor on the Fox Business Network, on Thursday and told him that Mr. Hannity was someone that viewers “want to see.” The shift most widely predicted is for Mr. Hannity to move up to 7 p.m., with Mr. Smith moving to anchor a midday newscast, perhaps at 1 p.m.

Fox News continues to dominate the ratings among the news networks, but of late its audience has aged upward, losing ground among the viewers most news advertisers seek to reach, those between the ages of 25 and 54.

All the anchors involved in the rumored switches are well within that age range themselves. Ms. Kelly is 42. Mr. Hannity is 51. And Mr. Smith is 49.

Mr. Baldwin is just over the line at 55, but he has just come off a multi-award-winning tenure on NBC’s comedy “30 Rock.” He has also attracted praise for his Internet podcast, where he interviews both celebrities and newsmakers.

Mr. Baldwin has been outspoken in his support of many liberal political issues, so he would presumably fit the profile of most hosts on MSNBC.

The network declined to comment publicly on the potential show, but one senior executive, who asked not to be identified, said, “We’re fans of Alec, but we don’t have anything to say regarding the unconfirmed reports.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 9, 2013

A previous version of this article misidentified the network associated with the anchor Neil Cavuto. It is the Fox Business Network, not the Fox Business Channel.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/10/business/media/reports-see-new-roles-for-megyn-kelly-and-alec-baldwin.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: The First Strike in the Roger Ailes Book Wars

March 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The Roger Ailes book wars have begun.

On Wednesday Vanity Fair’s Web site published an excerpt from the first of two — or maybe three — books about Mr. Ailes and the network he runs, the Fox News Channel.

The excerpt, from the book “Roger Ailes: Off Camera” by Zev Chafets, revealed little about Fox, but included a number of pointed one-liners uttered by Mr. Ailes, whose conservative politics appeal to many Fox viewers but infuriate his critics.

Mr. Chafets’s book will be published on March 19. It precedes another book about Mr. Ailes, tentatively titled “The Loudest Voice in the Room: Fox News and the Making of America,” by Gabriel Sherman of New York magazine.

Of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Ailes is quoted in the excerpt saying: “I have a soft spot for Joe Biden. I like him. But he’s dumb as an ashtray.” Of Newt Gingrich, a former Fox News analyst and Republican presidential candidate, Mr. Ailes said, “He’s a sore loser and if he had won he would have been a sore winner.” He proceeded to use an obscenity to describe Mr. Gingrich.

It is Mr. Ailes’s comment about President Obama that may garner the most attention. Mr. Ailes has been sharply critical of Mr. Obama in the past; last month he was quoted as saying “The president likes to divide people into groups. He’s too busy getting the middle class to hate rich people, blacks to hate whites. He is busy trying to get everybody to hate each other.”

In the book excerpt in Vanity Fair, Mr. Ailes is shown reacting to a remark during the presidential campaign by a Democratic strategist, Hilary Rosen, who said that Ann Romney “never worked a day in her life.” Mr. Ailes responded, “Obama’s the one who never worked a day in his life. He never earned a penny that wasn’t public money. How many fund-raisers does he attend every week? How often does he play basketball and golf? I wish I had that kind of time.” Mr. Ailes added, “He’s lazy, but the media won’t report that.”

Mr. Chafets said that when Mr. Ailes noticed his arched eyebrows, Mr. Ailes added, “I didn’t come up with that. Obama said that, to Barbara Walters.”

This is the type of quote that gets partisans on both sides riled up. Mr. Obama brought up laziness when Ms. Walters asked him in a 2011 interview on ABC, “What’s the trait you most deplore in yourself and the trait you most deplore in others?”

When he said laziness, she sounded surprised. He explained, “There is a — deep down, underneath all the work I do, I think there’s a laziness in me.” He chalked it up to his boyhood in sunny Hawaii.

He added, “But when I’m mad at myself, it’s because I’m saying to myself, ‘You know what, you could be doing better; push harder.’ And when I — nothing frustrates me more than when people aren’t doing their jobs.” Mr. Obama then said, to answer the other half of Ms. Walters’ question, that the trait he most dislikes in other people is cruelty. “I can’t stand cruel people,” he said. “And if I see people doing something mean to somebody else just to make themselves feel important, it really gets me mad.”

Mr. Ailes is also quoted in the excerpt on the subject of MSNBC, which has emerged as a less-highly-rated liberal counterweight to Fox News. Mr. Ailes said he warned NBC in the mid-1990s not to name the channel MSNBC because “M.S. is a damn disease.” At the time Mr. Ailes was the head of America’s Talking, the NBC cable channel that was effectively replaced by MSNBC in 1996. He left NBC to create Fox News.

Sometime after Mr. Sherman began working on his book, Mr. Ailes agreed to cooperate with Mr. Chafets, whose previous books include a favorable biography of Rush Limbaugh. Within the television industry, Mr. Chafets’s book is widely seen as an attempt to get out ahead of Mr. Sherman’s book. (Perhaps the better word for it is “prebuttal,” a word political operatives sometimes use).

The publisher of Mr. Chafets’s book, Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Group, told Politico earlier this week that Mr. Ailes “decided to grant our author exclusive interviews for his book, and he told his Fox News colleagues and friends that they were free to talk to Chafets. But Mr. Ailes had no control over the editorial process, which was between us and our author.”

Mr. Sherman’s book, meanwhile, has a May release date, but it is believed to have been delayed. Mr. Sherman wrote on Twitter Wednesday morning that he was struck by the way Mr. Ailes and his boss Rupert Murdoch talk about each other in the excerpt from Mr. Chafets’s book.

Mr. Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corporation, is quoted as saying that he defers to Mr. Ailes: “I have ideas that Roger can accept or not. As long as things are going well. …”

And Mr. Ailes is quoted as saying, “Does Rupert like me? I think so, but it doesn’t matter. When I go up to the magic room in the sky every three months, if my numbers are right, I get to live. If not, I’m killed. Our relationship isn’t about love — it’s about arithmetic. Survival means hitting your numbers. I’ve met or exceeded mine in 56 straight quarters. The reason is: I treat Rupert’s money like it is mine.”

Mr. Ailes is also said to be working on an autobiography — but there’s no release date for it. Perhaps he wants the last word on himself.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/the-first-strike-in-the-roger-ailes-book-wars/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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